


quietly, i tend the garden

by mag003 (MMagpieMcCorkle)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Asexual Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Bisexual Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Character Study, Established Relationship, F/F, F/M, Gen, Happy Post Series AU, He/Him and They/Them Pronouns for Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Jon Sims Bi Pride January 2021, M/M, Past Georgie Barker/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Polyamory, Slice of Life, no beta i just straight up Die, or an ATTEMPT at a character study smh, rated teen for Lang Widge. and maybe other stuff idk, vague(?) references to past trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-16 02:09:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28823472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MMagpieMcCorkle/pseuds/mag003
Summary: "Jon? Eeeeearth to Jon. Helloooo--""Jon's not here, terribly sorry. Please leave a message after the beep."Tim tilts his head back to laugh, then nudges Jon's knee with his own. "Alright, scoot over." Playful resistance for, what, five seconds, before he obliges. "So, what're you looking at us all lovey-dovey for?""Is a maybe-sort-of-man," Jon starts, picking up the affected voice he'd first used for recording statements in the beginning -- it's all a joke, anyway, "not allowed to look at the people he loves 'all lovey-dovey'?""No, they aren't."Jon mock-scowls across the room at Sasha who breaks into a full-blown cackle."Rude.""Yes! Thank you!"Exceedingly petty (if it were real irritation), Jon sticks his tongue out, and receives further laughter.---(Written as part of @jonsimsbipride for the prompt "pride", primarily, but also a bit of "hardship", "solidarity", and "gender".)
Relationships: Annabelle Cane & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Annabelle Cane/Sasha James, Martin Blackwood/Sasha James/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Tim Stoker, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 51
Collections: bi jon sims celebration





	quietly, i tend the garden

**Author's Note:**

> cw: implied past/recurring internalised biphobia/aphobia (just in case), brief mention of body horror wrt Annabelle's head injury. if there's anything else i missed please lmk
> 
> edit: my stuff isn't for freaks who like noncon/incest/abuse fetishizing, fuck off

He watches. ( _They_ watch. It's nice to think that to themself, one of their own little private joys.) Watches without feeding because he can't do that anymore (and it was like cutting out a knot of tangled hair, like popping bubblewrap, like throwing out yesterday's garbage -- but not really, not quite), and he watches fondly. The repaired world's news filters through, clear, but they don't pay much attention to it when they have Martin and Tim and Sasha and Annabelle to watch. 

It was Martin who'd suggested hanging up pride flags in their home, and honestly, why not? Even if (even _though_ ) Jon doesn't plan to attend any _public_ parades, there's no reason not to be proud at home. It was _never_ out of shame, just privacy.

(Georgie'd been the one to suggest it first, too, and Jon couldn't have felt any more relieved that someone else had thought of it first, that they weren't just humouring him if he'd been the one to ask. He'd loved Georgie back then just for that reason alone, and loved her before that; loved her for her no-nonsense approach, for her humour, for her humanity, for their shared love of The Admiral, loved her for not digging or prying or questioning into why he hated spiders and why he couldn't stand jeans and why there were certain numbers he'd favoured in distress. He'd loved her for everything she was.

They still love her. They, the two of them, cannot return to that point, but they still love her.)

In almost every room, save for the kitchen and bathroom (too many cabinets in the way, and the steam from showers would ruin them, and the flags are _so_ large that Jon had asked why they don't have smaller ones instead, or in addition), there are stripes of saturated colours pinned to and draping the walls: pink-purple-blue triple-pinned in the hallway, against the cupboard area under the stairs; rainbow in the living room; pinks-white-oranges in the dining room; blue-pink-white in the upstairs hallway (Sasha's favourite flag of the lot); every colour in their shared bedrooms. Jon's been on the fence about introducing the asexual flag, rationalising that there was already so much at home and that there's no room, really, but he keeps coming back to the idea anyway. They hate having to ask-- no, they hate _feeling_ like they have to ask, to feel like they cannot make room for the entirety of themself. Old habits and guilt are the main sources for that mess, they're sure. Still, might even introduce the nonbinary flag, who knows, they might be feeling impulsive. And the aromantic one for Sasha as a surprise gift.

"Jon? Eeeeearth to Jon. Helloooo--"

"Jon's not here, terribly sorry. Please leave a message after the beep."

Tim tilts his head back to laugh, then nudges Jon's knee with his own. "Alright, scoot over." Playful resistance for, what, five seconds, before he obliges. "So, what're you looking at us all lovey-dovey for?"

(Finding Tim again was... it hurt. It hurt to see Tim in his own domain, to see Tim unmoving, to see Tim afraid, horrified, the wailing of his prisoners a mourning chorus. How long had he been like that, in the Changed World where time did not flow, where time stagnated, where time rolled downhill like Sisyphus' boulder?

It hurt to think that there would be no time to even _try_ to repair everything with Tim. Jon would still shoulder Tim's resentment -- how pale the word in comparison to the truth -- but it wasn't _fair_. Jon thought they were used to everything going wrong but it was not fair to be put through with this cruelty again: something unfinished, unresolved.

But Tim followed.)

(The Watcher loved Tim as it loved Martin.)

"Is a maybe-sort-of-man," Jon starts, picking up the affected voice he'd first used for recording statements in the beginning -- it's all a joke, anyway, "not allowed to look at the people he loves 'all lovey-dovey'?"

"No, they aren't."

Jon mock-scowls across the room at Sasha who breaks into a full-blown cackle.

"Rude."

"Yes! Thank you!"

Exceedingly petty (if it were real irritation), Jon sticks his tongue out, and receives further laughter. The situation devolves into Jon smothering Sasha in kisses at the table as she shriek-laughs for him to stop, while Martin, Tim, and Annabelle egg him on. When he does stop, Martin's grabbed the laptop and shows Jon an asexual flag.

"Oh." To be honest, he's stunned in the most pleasant way, like he's feather-light. He makes a sound not so unlike a _honk_ when Sasha pulls him to sit on her lap. "I _swear_ you're actually a mind-reader, Martin."

"No! I just remember you ta-- well, mentioning it and I thought maybe you'd..." Martin makes a vague gesture to the screen. "You'd might like it."

"Mm," Jon hums, only pretending to consider it, "I suppose--"

"And also--" Martin selects a different tab, showing green-white-grey-black. "-- something for Sasha."

"Aww, Martin--"

"Oh so you _are_ a mind-reader."

(The Watcher was fond of Martin. It had been since... oh, it was _before_ Jon had changed the world. But when? When Jon rejoined the living? When they asked Martin to blind himself and run with them, away from the Institute? When they'd escaped to Scotland? Before the Unknowing? Before Leitner's death? Before Jane's siege on the Institute? They'd never thought -- or _wanted_ \-- to ask it; they're not should they would've received an answer.)

"Because you're _so_ full of original ideas."

"I am!"

"He is!"

"They are!"

"Oh my _God_. Annabelle, help me."

"Uhh-- I have... water to pour. Down the sink. Sorry."

Groaning and griping, all in jest, and Jon launches into is there even enough room to put any new ones up, and Tim says that of course there is, and Martin suggests layering as a vague idea, and Sasha says yeah the two can go in the hall opposite the bisexual flag, they'd fit there, and Annabelle assures that they would all make them fit.

Later, after dinner, Jon looks at the wall opposite the staircase. The door in the middle of it leads into the living room, and there's a mirror and sidetable on the side that's nearest to the door, and the other side is host to a coatrack. Would there actually be enough room? Did it matter, really, if they would just find somewhere else to hang both new flags anyway? Maybe Jon's just... getting all "weird" about it -- they know what it means, and maybe they're just being nitpicky over nothing, or it might be that problem of... God, it's not quite reconciling because they were never mutually exclusive, but once that idea, years ago, wormed its way into their head about their asexuality "sanitizing" their bisexuality, it... lingered, dormant, and it still does. Jonathan Sims is not ashamed, but the ideas that other people have are... well, they're just _shit_.

"Fucksake." They collapse into the chair, pressing a palm against their forehead.

"Jon?"

"Aaah!"

"Sorry." Sasha closes the living room door behind her and crouches beside them. "Are you alright?"

"Yes, I'm just..." He grimaces. "Overthinking." He holds her hand. "You know, the..."

"Yeah." Similar, but not the same.

(Sasha in the Library. Graham Folger in the Library. Carl Moore in the Library. Rose Cooper in the Library. No-one else in the Library, where the portraits portrayed people who were actually not-people and the statues were not-statues and the art was from the Gallery before it was wrestled back after its owners destruction at Jon's hands and slowly morphed, _morphing_ , into the Library. Victims becoming victors; the imprisoned becoming jailers.

Rose and the spiders in the corners. Carl and the close walls that were damp. Graham and the violent shades of dried red. Sasha and the fractal glass windows.

Was it possible to leave? Was it possible to hurt others less? Was it possible to make this new cycle of suffering stop?

Sasha had cried when he told her _how_.)

Jon squeezes her hand, and she squeezes back, and presses a kiss against his knuckles. "We know better, though."

"Oh, definitely," he says, shoving confidence into his voice, "better than any of the idiots who say otherwise." That gets Sasha to laugh, and he loves the sound like he loves her in her entirety, in her absolute _reality_. He holds her hand when they wander back into the living room where Martin's crouched by the DVD player with the _Kill Bill Volume Two_ disc in hand and Tim's arguing that he _cannot fucking stand_ "Mister Tortellini" so please, please pick anything else, and in turn Annabelle suggests _The Black Cauldron_ , so that's what they watch. Afterwards, they talk about movies, adaptations, books (and Jon's reluctance to read anything that _feels_ the same by the same author), and Annabelle carefully keeps quiet about movies relating back to Neil Lagorio and Dexter Banks.

When nighttime drops, Tim goes to bed first, finger-wagging that everyone else should too, or at least soon, _and not at three in the morning, Jon_ , and Martin follows soon after, yawning his head off, and Sasha half-an-hour later, kissing both Jon and Annabelle on the cheek before she goes. Then it's just the two on the sofa watching obnoxious infomercials at three in the morning.

"Are you actually comfortable with me here?" Annabelle asks, and she looks so different from how he'd first envisioned her: Darren Harlow's recount of her many limbs after the failed experiment; the web-weaving of the statement she'd left behind at Hill Top Road; and now different still from Upton House -- the webs on ( _in_ ) her head are gone and replaced by scar tissue, the purple-black silk of her clothes exchanged for peach-and-pink cotton-and-polyester that swamps her. She looks both comfortable and not, her freedom still something she's acclimating to.

"Yes." It's the obvious answer. "Well... I mean there was that _animosity_ because of the Web--"

"Mother of Puppets." It's automatic out of her and she bites her lip hard. "Old habits."

"It's--" It's not really OK. "I understand. Anyway, the animosity because of the Web didn't help." When Annabelle opens her mouth, they interrupt. "That said, it is... well it's something to have-- to know someone who also hates spiders as much as I do." She laughs at that, light and relieved.

(The meat of her body, the internal clocks, the gears, the roads, the pathways, the stop signs, all belonged to the Mother. And so swapped for spiders and cobwebs. Annabelle recounted the raw scrape of a spider's hand hollowing her out as Jon--)

(The first scan in the repaired world showed a perfectly normal brain. She couldn't believe she wasn't dead.)

Annabelle yawns, surprising herself. Bedtime for stragglers; Jon's not being left behind.

Before the bedroom door, she stops. Her voice is quiet when she says with a small smile, "It's... nice. Being with people who know what it's like." Jon follows her glance towards the trans flag; he knows that she and Sasha went to the same university, were together for a while. "I've missed it."

Jon barely hums in response, like it might wake the others.

The morning sees an early delivery at half seven in the morning (Martin grumbles how he's not a human being until eight o'clock, fucking thank you, who makes deliveries this bastard early?) and the fiddling of the asexual and aromantic flags across from the bisexual flag. After a brief ironing, of course, under Tim's insistence or else it'd look fugly as hell with all the creases. And after breakfast.

When the pins are in place ("probably shouldn't hammer them in, should we?" "no, probably not." "... fuck it." "yeah, fuck it.") and the flags look _right_ , Jon takes a moment to look at both the pink-purple-blue over the understair cupboard, and the black-grey-white-purple on the opposite wall. It feels right, he thinks, as right as Sasha's green-white-grey-black. He can't stop smiling.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. i simply think they deserve a good time, and also time to heal and mourn and grieve for when they couldn't.  
> 2\. i was originally going to do something Solely for the Pride Prompt but oogh this was all over the place i think. hit most(?) the boxes accidentally. also not sure if i actually hit on the Bisexual Part of jon's identity as much as i wanted but! ah well [broken heart emoji]  
> 3\. wrt the rainbow flag - i like to think it's the Original flag (with the turquoise and? was it pink or lavender that was cut off. one of those i think.) and Also the Black and Brown stripes. ten whole colours all of which are important yeah [heart emoji]  
> 4\. annabelle rights [heart emoji] she has Issues tho :(  
> 5\. the not them victims got caught up in Evil Art World as shamu and me decided they're not dead lol  
> 6\. ... this was meant to be Just Jon Sims Bi Pride Stuff how did it involve Sad Stuff gfihfdihod im sorry  
> 7\. also yes jon Did die but it's fine. he did an ollie lol  
> 8\. the ending's a bit naff im sorry u_u


End file.
